Hard drive back from the (almost) dead

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 6th, 2005 • 5:48 am

The hard drive that I was talking about earlier today has decided to come back from its state of near-death… While I was in the process of painstakingly recovering the files at a very slow speed with RBrowser Lite, all of a sudden the transfer speed picked up considerably. I finished recovering all the files and then went to the Finder to see if the drive’s partitions were behaving normally again. And indeed they were. No more atrocious sluggishness!

I tried to eject the drive, turn it off, turn it back on, and connect it again. Here too, things worked just fine. And the noise coming from the drive is perfectly normal now.

What to make of this? Could the drive be fine after all?

I don’t think I am going to take any chances… Now that I have recovered all the files, I am just going to erase all personal information from the hard drive and ship it back to Seagate. I managed to get a RMA number from their lousy website that only supports Netscape 7.0 or Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. (I ended up placing my request via Virtual PC!)

Of course, their RMA page states: “Seagate will not send your drive back. Please back up all your data before returning the drive.” Which is rather idiotic considering that most people will return their drives after they have failed and become unusable. Still, I for one was indeed able to back up all my data! Phew! A lot of time wasted, though… I guess it is a warning from the computer gods that I am not backing up often enough.


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